In which issues concerning the profession of philosophy are bitched griped about

Tuesday, December 16, 2008

We have the technology!

Novel idea. A while ago I was thinking about the best way to do the 'teach something to students you don't know who don't want to say stupid things in front of their teachers' during an on-campus interview. (Getting ahead of myself? Sure... but it beats the shit out of watching my interviews melt away one by one on the wiki.) It occurred to me that we don't have to do it this way.

At my school, the library has audio visual equipment that I can check out... For free... If you want to know how I teach mid-semester, why can't I just send in a video or two of me teaching mid-semester. You get to see me teach. I get to 'audition' without all the artifice. Win/win?

2 comments:

Not a win win. Your students might be very different from the students we have at our school. (I teach at a school where the student body has a distinctive vibe that makes teaching here different from teaching elsewhere.) So it matters to us what our students say, following the class, about your teaching. Also, we are not interested in seeing you lecture, say, to 100 students -- we want to see you teach classes of the size at our school. Finally, I have watched demos on videotape, and it is very hard to gauge how the students are doing -- usually the camera is focussed primarily on the lecturer, and so you can't get a sense of the level of engagement. So, sorry --- it wouldn't work for us.

For what it's worth, I think as a candidate you get a better sense of the school you are visiting when you teach a class there -- so (if you end up with multiple offers) doing a teaching demo at a place can provide you with a good sense of what the place is like.

Speaking of technology, apparently somebody was just editing the wiki and fucked up the HTML tags. As a result, EVERY school after Washington & Lee has a line through it. It looks like 2/3's of the jobs were canceled in one swift stroke on a really bad December afternoon. The madness continues.